Abstract: Provided are techniques for heuristic and non-semantic prediction of the cost to find and review data that is relevant to a task. A corpus of documents is accessed for a domain. Terms associated with the domain are accessed, where the terms have an order on a list. For each of the documents, term positional dispersion is determined for each of the terms in the ordered list associated with the domain. Then, a document review quanta is determined for the document based on a summation of the term positional dispersion for each term in that document adjusted by a weight. A subset of documents in the corpus of documents are selected that are to be reviewed based on the document review quanta for each of the selected documents exceeding a threshold.